All posts tagged Feedback

There are a variety of ways that students and staff can keep up to date with what is happening in Information Services. ‘Information Services supports research, learning, teaching and administrative activities by providing Library, Information and Learning Technology services to Heriot-Watt students and staff around the world’.

The best place to find out anything about IT and libraries in the university is to visit our webpages HWU Information Services

Here you will find information about all the services we offer and deliver at all our campuses. The system status page will flag up any problems with systems. The webpages also give details about how to contact us – by email, telephone and in person.

If you have an IT issue then contact the IT Helpdesk ithelp@hw.ac.uk +44 (0) 131 451 4045

Library enquiries can also be submitted via IThelp.

If you are at our Edinburgh Campus, the library is open 24/7 and is staffed by library staff at these times

We also operate a quick contact alert service in the library for students to let staff know about any issues. It is based on on email, iMessaging and text messaging.

Email: Tell-IS@hw.ac.uk

iMessage: tellhwuIS@icloud.com

Text: Text TELL and then your message to 07950081076

We use social media to communicate updates and useful information. It is also a good platform for students and staff to let us know about issues or to make suggestions for improvements.

Blog posts on InformS give regular updates on all aspects of our services – recent posts have included posts on online journals and databases, IT security advice, passwords, reserving books, training and events.

Our twitter news feed HWU_IS gives news and updates as they happen so is a great communication channel to follow to find out what’s happening. An example of this is our updates on occcupancy of the library and other study spaces so students know the best place to go to find a study space. Any emergency situations or if other systems are down, this information will be posted on twitter.

Our facebook page gives regular updates and also has posts about interesting and useful resources and events. Things that are happening within the library and university or around Edinburgh, recommendations for reading and accessing online and opportunities for feedback.

Using google forms is proving to be a quick and easy way of getting feedback from students who use our Edinburgh campus library. We have already been using them for recording quick, easily resolvable enquiries at the library service desk so decided to try them out last year for feedback.
The feedback that we wanted to capture was about the purpose of visits to the library and consisted of three questions
What is the purpose of your visit to the library today?
How long do you intend to stay in the library today?
If more facilities could be added to the library, which 3 are the most important?
There were a selection of options to choose from for questions 1 and 3.
The questions were printed out and handed to students to fill in at the library service desk.
We had 513 responses and the feedback helped to inform developments in the library last summer including the installation of new group study spaces that have proven very popular with students.
Although the forms were printed out the responses were entered by staff into the google form online and this made it very easy to collate the responses and produce a summary.

This year, at the same time of year, we produced an updated form to collect feedback based again on the purpose of visits to the library. The questions were similar in that question 1 and 2 were the same and question 3 was ‘If more study spaces could be added to the library for next semester, which 3 are the most important’?
Respondents could select more than one response.
Copies of the form were printed out and distributed at the Library service desk as before. Also in order to promote the form, a link to it was posted on the Information Services Facebook page and twitter feed. This resulted in quite a few online responses – of the total 373 responses, 291 paper and 82 electronic.
The responses were input into the google form which automatically populates a spreadsheet of results. The other useful feature of a google form is that it automatically produces a summary of results in an easy to read format.

The results show a preference for individual study spaces which is a reflection of the time of year leading up to revision but also reflects the room usage figures that we collect.
Preferences for future developments show a demand for individual study spaces and in fact more study spaces of all kinds. Students selected more than one type of study space that they would like to see in the future.

We’re doing a quick survey this week to find out the reasons that you visit the library and if more study spaces could be added, what sort would be the most useful.
We did a similar survey last year at this time and this helped inform the changes to the library space last summer – we were able to install more group study spaces including the study booths which have proved very popular.

If you would like to fill in the quick survey, it only takes 20 seconds, then you can pick one up from the Library Service Desk or you can fill it in online here bit.ly/1PSJbA4